The Best Hats for Havasupai!

Posted by Libero Gruppioni
on
August 22, 2016

A little over a week ago now I had the incredible experience of visiting the Havasupai Indian Reservation with a select group of 8 friends for 4 days.

Let me start by saying that If you've never heard of this place, look it up, it is a veritable paradise. Between the Arizona heat, the 70 degree turquoise blue water, lush foliage, and cascading waterfalls you'll feel like you've been transported to a tropical island somewhere.

But to be fair, it's not all leisure and scenic vistas. This is a backpacking excursion where you really need to bring your life with you on your back. For us this meant an 11.5 mile hike from the parking lot down into and through the canyon. In order to beat the AZ heat, we woke up at 3am and were on the trail right before 4 o'clock.

The hike took us about 4 1/2 hours to finally get to our campsite which was located on the edge of Mooney Falls (This is the best campsite in the entire campground).

Now of course when you're going on an epic trip with a bunch of friends and you're in the hat business, you make sure you have your hat game in order. On this trip we brought four trusty styles and all served us extremely well. The lineup is as follows:

This hat is made of extremely durable raffia straw fibers. This makes it easily packable and crushable while also offering exceptional sun protection. Inside it has a very comfortable elasticized sweatband with the "Scala" logo embroidered within. This is always a crowd favorite.

Next up is the Kooringal Havana Drover hat. This hat, like the Scala Lifeguard, is made of raffia. One of my personal favorites & the hat that I wore on the trip, this one is comfortable, lightweight, packable, and has the chin strap for wind & carrying plus snaps on either side if you want to get fancy and snap the brim up :)

The wild card hat. Typically I would never suggest wool felt in the AZ heat but it's owner loves this hat and brought it along. While he said that it did get a little hot, I was very surprised by it's durability throughout the trip. The hat is advertised as rain repellant, but my buddy actually did a rope swing with his on, getting it totally submerged, and the next day it dried out just fine. Top marks for sure.

One of the simplest and most functional outdoor hats you can own, this standard bucket was a perfect fit for this trip. It is lightweight, very packable, has 4 grommets around the crown for breathability, and the brim is just wide enough to cover all the important places like your face, ears, and neck.

As you can see we had a blast and I highly recommend this trip to anyone. For anyone interested in other styles of hats that are good for the outdoors, I hope you find the following links below helpful.